


If we only had an arc

by yourlibrarian



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Commentary, Episode: s03e12 Jus In Bello, Gen, Meta, Season/Series 03, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 05:16:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6786904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I am still irked by the lack of commentaries on SPN's shortest season yet, but much less so compared to how annoyed I became at some of the comments by Gamble and Kripke.  Honestly, it seems somehow miraculous that we get anything worth watching ending up on screen. The comments in question were Gamble's on JiB and Kripke's on Dream.  It made me think of a post I read complaining about Kripke as a show runner, and how he was given chance after chance to have his own shows and yet seemed largely uninterested in his own creations.  On the whole I thought the post had too much of an ax to grind, but I thought there was a lot of truth to this portrayal, especially since most of it comes right out of Kripke's mouth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If we only had an arc

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted December 16, 2008

I am still irked by the lack of commentaries on SPN's shortest season yet, but much less so compared to how annoyed I became at some of the comments by Gamble and Kripke. Honestly, it seems somehow miraculous that we get anything worth watching ending up on screen.

The comments in question were Gamble's on JiB and Kripke's on Dream. It made me think of a post I read complaining about Kripke as a show runner and how he was given chance after chance to have his own shows and yet seemed largely uninterested in his own creations. On the whole I thought the post had too much of an ax to grind, but I thought there was a lot of truth to this portrayal, especially since most of it comes right out of Kripke's mouth. 

To start with Gamble, she was talking about both the introduction of Lilith and the demise of Henriksen. Now I'll start out by saying I'm somewhat unobjective about Henriksen because he was one of my favorite characters on this show and I was really aggravated at having him be the umpteenth "died or disappeared too soon" character on the show. However my feeling that there was no good reason for killing him off seemed to me entirely borne out by Gamble's discussion. She said that the FBI storyline has been hanging over the boys' heads for a whole season and that it needed to be wrapped up and Victor needed to be killed off. What? 

For starters we'd seen him in 2 prior episodes so really that whole thread had only been followed up on _once_ and hardly referred to otherwise. If you happened to have missed Folsom and were just a casual viewer, I'm pretty sure you'd be completely unaware that law enforcement was after the Winchesters –- at least any more so than they might be after Usual Suspects anyway. And given that the storylines in S3 didn't have any more bearing on the FBI one than in any other season, why was there this pressure to "wrap up" that ongoing thread? We could have had one episode in S3 and one episode in S4 or S5 to continue it (back when we were told this show had 5 season arc). It really sounds like they just didn't know what to do with the whole idea. And, as is the case with other storylines where they didn't know how to further them, they just ended the thread. Gamble hedges at the end about whether Victor is really dead, but given she penned 4.02 this season we all know for sure now. (One other aside, I had to wonder if Ron coming back wasn't either a money or scheduling issue because unlike the other ghosts, he actually _didn't_ die of supernatural causes. He was shot by a SWAT team.)

The other issue was Lilith's introduction. While it's possible a new big bad's appearance had been planned for a while (Azazel's death almost guaranteed it after the end of S2), it wasn't until the writing of this episode that they had any real idea of who the character was supposed to be. Which means that the _role_ the character was to play was actually the primary concern, not the character herself. I could have guessed that from the way she's been handled, but this made it clear why she's been so poorly developed. It also explains what some have complained about re: earlier references to the "new power" in S3 which suggested that the demon was male. It's because he was. It was Gamble's decision to make her female and a little girl when she finally appears in this episode (and apparently she thinks British girls are particularly creepy –- maybe that explains Bela). 

Ah yes, Bela. On the one hand I felt vindicated at the way I felt that whole [Bela dream sequence in Dream came out of nowhere](http://yourlibrarian.livejournal.com/80689.html). Apparently it did. I remember hearing talk of how they'd been trying to get Jason to appear in the episode, as an 80s dream flashback Dean would have. (Given Jared's forthcoming role I'm rather glad they didn't). Instead because of a very last minute lack of copyright clearance, they had to scrap that scene and insert a new one. Since Bela was already appearing in order to steal the Colt (which itself was a storyline that went nowhere, with her feature episode lost to the strike), they decided to write the Sam/Bela scene. 

Kripke contrasts this scene to Dean's scene with Lisa. And here I'm not clear if that scene was in the original script but I'm going to guess yes, because that would have been a real last minute casting job to get back the same actress (whereas Lauren was already on hand). And he's right in that this is a great character moment, not only for Dean but for Sam, as we get to see the difference between the two brothers in terms of their surface personalities and their inner ones. Unfortunately, it's an accidental one. 

Similarly, they wanted to get JDM back for this episode, with Dean being berated by John in the hotel room rather than his inner self. I can imagine how thrilled all the John fans would have been to see that. Luckily thanks to JDM's lack of availability, I think the scene was more powerful in that Dean himself gives that speech. For one thing, it's more accurate. What Dean tells himself is what Dean feels, not necessarily what John ever felt or intended. Second, it would have been a particularly ugly scene given that we already had one "bad dad" in the story, and John was already being echoed in the dual confrontations Sam and Dean were undergoing. Given the pilot's original dialogue, it seems to me that John was always intended to be a more abusive and erratic figure than the one we finally got (who stepped in to make these changes, I don't know) -– although the legacy of that is this contradictory figure that was largely saved by the warmth of JDM's portrayal. I get the feeling that that negative characterization is something that lives on in ideas like this.

More to the point though, what really annoyed me in the discussion of this scene was Kripke's discussion of Dean's motivation, specifically " **if we had an arc** for Dean this season, it would be" his overcoming his low self-esteem and coming into his own in a way we haven't seen before. In fact, I thought that transition came through pretty well, something I mentioned [in these final paragraphs discussing the S3 arc.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6759103) Dean makes it very clear in the final episodes of S3 that whatever the truth of what the YED told him in S1 -- that he needed his family more than they needed him -- it's no longer true. He has come to believe he can only rely on himself. Now that we know what happened between S3 and S4, there's really a gulf between him and Sam that has made him a truly independent entity. 

But " _if_ we had an arc" for one of your main characters, Kripke? Really? What is driving this show if not your two characters arcs? I notice that in his discussion of TKAA and SPN Christmas, there's no mention of Sam and Dean's storylines in his comments. Rather he talks about how the mother drowning her daughter was the motivation for that story, and his research on evil Santa was the motivation for Christmas. To most fans however (if not most viewers), TKAA stood out due to Dean's conflicted feelings about family, legacy, and his unfulfilled hopes for his life, and Christmas to Sam's lost dreams about _his_ life. Even on my first viewing I laughed at the CBS Special title, since I share Kripke's associations with it, so I appreciate his insistence that it be included in the show. But really, this focus on the sidelines rather than the center of the show certainly explains the boredom he apparently has with any number of promising (or crucial) themes and arcs, and may also explain the unexpected news that he has nothing left to tell us in S5.


End file.
